1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed herein relates generally to methods and systems for analyzing and using digital music compositions, and more particularly to a method and system for determining the characteristics of a musical composition by analyzing its digital composition, and recommending particular musical compositions to users based upon the relative comparability of a user's desired musical characteristics and the musical characteristics of a collection of digital music.
2. Description of the Background
Historically, what is pleasing to the human ear has not changed since man began making sounds. Patterns in music that are pleasing to the human ear have not changed much, if at all, since the times of the classical composers. What has changed are styles, performances, the instruments used, and the way music is produced and recorded; but a compelling melody is still compelling and a series of random notes still sounds random. For example, the dictionary describes melody as a series of notes strung together in a meaningful sequence. Unfortunately, some sequences sound meaningful and make up a beautiful song and other sequences just sound like noise.
While the number of possible melody patterns combined with all of the other variables in recorded music allow for a seemingly infinite number of combinations, the patterns that we find pleasing have not changed. That is not to say everything has been invented, however. So far, every new style of music that has come into being: country, rock, punk, grunge etc. have all had similar mathematical patterns. The hits in those genres have all come from the same ‘hit’ clusters that exist today and anything that has fallen outside of such ‘hit’ clusters has rarely been successfully on the charts for its musical qualities.